Last week, Sara Guidry of Louisiana noticed something strange about her son's mouth. Something seemed off: It looked as if a sharp, foreign object was jutting from his gums. Turns out, after inspecting her son's mouth, she found — wait for it — fingernails. Lots and lots of fingernails. Twenty-seven of them, to be exact, shoved deep into her son's gums.

"I get a tweezer and pull it. It looked like a finger nail. I continued to pull 4 more out," Guidry captioned a Facebook video of this very process, which has garnered more than 13 million views since it was posted on May 16. "I then search his mouth and find another area. I pulled around 27 out of the second spot. YES 27!"

Guidry added that she took her son to the local dentist, who had never seen anything like this before. (Yeah, me neither.) "We figured out that [he] bites his nails and plays with them in his mouth," Guidry wrote. "He pushes them up towards his pallet. The nail penetrates the skin and goes into a pocket between the baby teeth and permanent teeth."

When I asked New York City-based dentist Timothy Chase about the incident, he tells me that while he's seen his fair share of foreign objects in patients' mouths, he's never seen fingernails make their way into a patient's gums. If a patient did come to him in such a condition, treatment would consist of a thorough exam, removal of the visible foreign bodies, X-rays to confirm removal, a solid cleaning, and "counseling on the dangers of [nail-biting]."

Chase explains that nail-biting, or onychophagia, can have both short- and long-term negative effects on the teeth and gums. "[In the short-term], the usual issue we see with nail-biting is chipping or fracturing of the edges of the individual teeth," he says. "[In the long-term, we see] wearing down of many teeth."

While onychophagia isn't usually a habit that can be cured overnight, I certainly hope Guidry can wean her son off his nail-biting habit, and fast.